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Sorry the site went down. Yesterday’s Commerce Clause post brought in some crippling traffic. On that note, it’s always fun when a highly-linked, somewhat divisive post brings in new readers. Like this guy:

I mean seriously fuckwits, you all supported torture, supported outing CIA agents, and supported serious fuckwittery with the 2000 election, but you get your panties in a bind over Mandates, an idea that conservative think tanks spent 20 years selling. HFS you are all dumber than a Palin raised on lead paint Taco Bell gorditas.

He has me down pat, doesn’t he?

Also, I don’t know that conservatives have been pushing mandates. They usually condemn them. And the ones who condemn the loudest are usually the ones we find out later were secretly enjoying them.

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on Wednesday, December 15th, 2010 at 8:09 pm by Radley Balko
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Cornelian: what with health care (commerce clause); DADT and gay marriage (Bill of Rights, 14th amd); Wikileaks and campaign finance (first amendment), and the recent 2nd Amd stuff, the constitutional law professors must think they have died and gone to heaven.

More than most things, I’d like to see more actual teeth in the 4th and 14th amendments to control rogue cops, TSA agents, and snooping CIA and FBI.

The commerce clause does not have the word “People” in it, so how does it give congress the right to regulate commerce between People? FACT- it does NOT! Just because some black robed terrorists say that it does?

They don’t have domestic jurisdiction. It’s federal law enforcement you have to worry about. The FBI is the most dangerous one because after the CIA was castrated by the Kennedy-Church commission, the FBI started to slowly build up its own foreign operations. Now, the FBI roams the globe almost as much as the CIA used to.

That should scare you, since the FBI is the closest thing we have now to the KGB. In fact, if the NSA’s full name weren’t the NSA/CSS, I’d advocate renaming the FBI to “CSS” as that’s the Roman abbreviation for what KGB means in English (Committee for State Security).

The discussion was great. There was a great illustration of the inability of many to think outside of the worldview they have come to hold. It was quite clear that the position of the house – “the constitution provides a limited set of powers to the government” – was utterly incomprehensible to a certain progressive mindset. Crystallizing the notion of limited powers by eliminating the bill of rights from discussion engendered confusion rather than thoughtful debate.

One snarkily commented that the bill of rights is the only guarantor of rights and limit to the government (rendering the question illogical on its face). Others could not fathom that there is a distinction between “democratically elected officials deciding” and “constitutional authority for government action”. It was clear that in the minds of many, as long as a majority supports a policy, that policy is constitutional. Because constitutional equals democratic in their world view.

Many erroneous opinions about the nature of the constitution and the foundation of governmental authority were directly challenged by historical reference, analogy, allegory and direct confrontation. Most of the objections so voiced went completely uncomprehended as people wedded to their world view talked past each other.

There were many lessons to take from the discussion. Perhaps the most salient was something akin to “you can lead a horse to water..”

Of course the guy quoted is dead wrong about Radley and many of his readers, but he’s certainly right about people who say, as I saw a couple of times in the discussion, that the American Right acts based on clear Constitutional principles while the American Left just makes it up as they go along. I think the abusive rant is really aimed at those guys, he just picked the wrong group of people to go full O-ring on.

But I have to say: Listening to a Right-winger tie himself in knots to defend the Constitutionality of, say, Guantanamo Bay or the Raich case, only to declare that “liberals just do whatever; they have no guiding principles,” is pretty damn infuriating. Reason has been furious at the TSA for years, por ejemplo, but your average righty only got religion on that issue in twenty ought eight.